… When my big poetry manuscript comes back from Farrar, Straus (they must have sent it by now), just keep it for scrap paper; I’ve typed up my large and new version of the book here.
… Olwyn is very nice, a beautiful blond, slim girl, my height and size, with yellow-green eyes and delicate, graceful bone structure; looks 21, not 31. I get along with her much better now that she’s really accepted me as Ted’s wife and like her immensely. She has a long vacation from her job as secretary-translator for a French theater agency in Paris; her most interesting job yet.
… No [Christmas] tree, which I missed. But Ted and I will have a little one next year for our Nicholas/Katharine (do you like Katharine Frieda Hughes as a name?). DO WRITE. I miss you and Warren and Sappho immensely and look for letters. Ted joins in sending love.
Sivvy
RUGBY STREET
LONDON, ENGLAND
JANUARY 10, 1960
Dear Mother,
I have no idea when I last wrote you, but it was a long time back. Ted and I have been in London for just a week now and out of touch with everything in Yorkshire, including mail, so I don’t know what’s waiting for us there.
The search for an apartment has been very tiring: London is so enormous in area and very expensive by American standards…. Now we are considering unfurnished flats and, thanks to an industrious and influential British lady, wife of a young American poet [W. S. Merwin], will look at some tomorrow that have hot water, central heating, a fridge—about a 10-minute walk from Regent’s Park and very good shops. We’d invest in a new double bed and get tables and chairs in second-hand shops—a small start toward furnishing a home; but that’s tomorrow. Junk and second-hand shops here are good for sturdy furniture and china.
We started out living in a cold, cheerless room-and-breakfast place for $5 a day, but hunting for the other two meals was a bore and inconvenient, so now we are much more comfortable and have moved into a spare room here [on] Rugby Street with Helga and Daniel Huws. Now we can easily cook our meals and that is very restful. Helga is a real German Hausfrau—scrubs, polishes, so although they live in a condemned district, her two floors are clean and colorful; her German cooking is delightful and makes me feel at home….
… Thanks to Dido Merwin (the British woman) and her husband Bill, I got an appointment with their doctor yesterday, whom I liked immediately. He examined me, weighed me (I’m 145, only 10 pounds more than usual) and referred me to his partner, who is an obstetrician. I shall go to his prenatal clinic Thursday. The procedure here is radically different from that in America, and I’m not sure but that I shall like it better. Hospital beds are spoken for at least eight months ahead of time, and, except in special cases, all childbirth is “natural,” without anesthesia (because this is less expensive, I imagine), and the hospitals keep you twelve days. Midwives do most of the deliveries. … My doctor said that at this date I could only be entered in a hospital as an “emergency” patient—or I could be delivered at home by him or his partner if I preferred them to a midwife and be given care and advice by a trained nurse … most deliveries here are home deliveries. This sounded much the best thing to me and if one of these unfurnished flats comes through (they are just around the corner from the M.D.’s office), I shall be all set and very glad to escape the crowded labor wards and hospital food. Ted will cook and care for me; I shall get good sleep and not feel lonely and cut off … The best care here is under the System … and so the baby should be perfectly free….
… Once we get a foothold in London, life will become much easier and pleasanter, and I think I shall like it better than anywhere else; but I have gone through a very homesick and weary period….
Love to you and Warren.
Sivvy
HEBDEN BRIDGE, YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND
JANUARY 16, 1960
Dearest Mother,
Ted and I arrived back at the Beacon [Ted’s home] last night after two gruelling weeks in London to find three good letters waiting from you; you have no idea how much mail from you means, especially now, when I most miss having you with us….
Now I am sitting in the big warm bathrobe Mrs. Hughes made me, with a crackling coal fire at my back, overlooking a sunny (for the first time in a month) landscape of dazzling snow-covered moortops and a raft of billowing clouds racing under a blue sky—our first snow. I had a hot bath last night, my first in two weeks (Helga puts up with the lack of a bathroom in their London flat and a public toilet three flights down in a dirty open cellar with a Germanic stoicism), and I am just waiting till the water heats to wash my grubby hair.
… Faber … sent us a copy of the paper jacket of Ted’s [second] book which amazed and delighted us—a triumph as covers go … The book should come out here in late March or early spring, and we’ll send you a copy right away….
After traveling endlessly on busses, subways and taxis … and seeing ugly, dirty, too expensive furnished and unfurnished flats and getting more and more cold and tired, we ended up with two possibilities practically next door to my doctor. One was an unbelievably big and beautiful furnished ground floor flat overlooking a road and Primrose Hill (a green park across the street from Regent’s Park) from the big front room; a charming garden from the mammoth bedroom and glassed-in kitchen and dining area, at 9 guineas ($27) a week, to be heated by electric fires (extra). We could have afforded this on Ted’s Guggenheim [awarded Ted in 1959] for a year, and it would have been available right away, but the owner, who lived downstairs and was presently away doing his decorating work in the Bahamas, has said NO CHILDREN. We telegrammed to see if a crib-size baby would be all right for a year, but there is, as yet, no answer.
The other alternative (and a rare one) is a third floor [fourth floor in the United States] unfurnished flat in a 5-story house in a quiet square, overlooking a little green with benches and fence for mothers and children, in 5 minutes’ walking distance from Primrose Hill and beautiful Regent’s Park (with a zoo, swings, sandboxes, swans, flowers, etc.), a laundromat, shops, my doctors, too. The whole house is in the stage of being all done over—painted, papered, bathrooms put in, which will mean our starting in on buying our own things. The flat is really too small … and lacks a study for Ted, but it is only 6 guineas ($18) a week (gas and electricity extra) on a 3-year lease, which is sublettable or assignable….
Our marvelous friends, the Merwins, have tables, chairs, and rugs to loan us until we pick up our own here and there in the excellent second-hand shops in London. So we signed the lease this Friday … At least we’ll have our own things and can hang our own pictures, etc. It’s an ideal location, like living in a village, ten minutes from the center of London. Getting a foot in is the hard part….
I’m going to see if London has diaper service. Will go down there at the end of next week to shop and get blood and urine test results from the doctor, whom I saw again this week. Why do they ask if any relative has had diabetes? How hereditary is it? Forward all mail here.
x x x Sivvy
JANUARY 27, 1960
Dearest Mother,
… I made a mushroom omelette for breakfast and have been having a very pleasant and relaxing day, our trunks being packed and sent off to London at last. Ted has constructed a bird-feeding station and a clothes line wrapped with bacon rinds just outside the picture window, so against a backdrop of blue-misty green fields and blurred trees, I have been watching the marvelous little birds come: tiny robins, round, with a patch of warm orange like a bib; blue tits, smaller-than-sparrow-sized versions of our jays; and the lovely multicolored chaffinches.
I feel in very good health … I am taking iron pills and every so often sleeping pills (not barbiturates) like those you gave me, for the baby kicks so much at night (it seems to wake up then) that it keeps me awake. So this way I can assure myself of a good night’s sleep, which is really the foundation of my health. When I am as rested as I am now, I feel I can cope with anything; while when I allow myself to get tired, I feel very homesick a
nd blue. I really look forward to next week, settling in, having time just to rock back and forth, looking happily ahead to the baby! I have been rushing about so much I hardly notice being pregnant at all. I am an impressive size now…. My only actual symptoms are a tendency to backache after standing or typing (walking doesn’t tire me; I manage two or three, even five miles a day) and occasional heartburn, which is evidently natural—I haven’t much room for a stomach and have a very good appetite … Can you get used to Frieda Rebecca as a girl’s name? I think I’ll write Aunt Frieda about it, as I’m sure it would please her to know I want to name my first girl after her (even if this is a Nicholas Farrar, as I’m sure it will be). Isn’t it wonderful to have a children’s book [Ted’s Meet My Folks] ready to be dedicated to whomever it is!
x x x Sivvy
7 CHALCOT SQUARE
LONDON, ENGLAND
FEBRUARY 2, 1960
Dearest Mother, Warren, and Sappho,
This is the first piece of mail to go out from our new residence. I am typing at an old, unpainted table loaned us by our friends, the Merwins … listening to hammers, clanking chisels, and the cries of children in the “Chalcot Square Gardens,” as the sign says below.
… Yesterday they installed the stove, which is the most beautiful I have ever seen or worked on … I loved putting out my beautiful pots and pans, Warren, and always think of you when I use them, which is often each day.
The bed came yesterday, too. Six feet six inches long and five feet wide … We had a wonderful sleep on it last night, exhausted to the bone as we were from workmen arriving all day yesterday and all our trunks, suitcases to be unpacked downstairs and carried up by armloads … Ted did all that lugging of all our books and clothes….
Our friends, the Merwins, are going to their farm in France at the end of April and for the summer and are going to let Ted use Bill’s study—the quietest place in London—and we use their garden while they’re gone! Isn’t that lovely? Dido said all we have to do in return (she always makes some little task, she says, so that people won’t feel they’re imposing) is to keep their marvelous Siamese cat company … and mow the little lawn. They live 5 minutes away from us, so it will be heavenly. The widowed woman who lives in the Russian-novel antique attic upstairs came here twenty years ago and is a French interpreter for the telephone company. She lives surrounded by hyacinths—all sorts of flowering plants—very warm-hearted; says you can hear the lions and seals and foreign birds roaring and cawing in the distance from the Regent’s Park Zoo when the windows are open in the summer! I just wish we could buy a house around here someday.
My prize is very simple and small—about $20 for a poem that tied for first place in a British critical magazine. Poems were sent in from all over, but it made me cheered those dreary first weeks in London….
Lots of love from us both,
Sivvy
SUNDAY EVENING
FEBRUARY 7, 1960
Dearest Mother and Warren,
Well, here I am, sitting at my little enamel table in the warm, cheerful kitchen, my Olivetti open before me, the timer (yours) ticking away, an apfelkuchen in the oven and a chicken stew gently simmering on top of the stove….
… Ted … has just finished painting the living room walls white over the nice rough-textured liner paper, which looks wonderful … We are going to have a lovely engraving of Isis from one of Ted’s astrological books blown up to cover one of the side-wall panels … and, of course, Ted’s “Pike” and our Baskins [the artist Leonard Baskin, a member of the Smith faculty who was close to both Sylvia and Ted] …
… My midwife, Sister Hannaway, should come to the house to see me sometime this week, and I shall go to her relaxation classes in Bloomsbury Square as soon as I make arrangements with her. Now that the strain of looking for a place is over and the apartment responding so rapidly to our work, I feel happy as I have ever been in my life; both of us eagerly anticipating Nicholas/Rebecca….
Love to Warren and more congratulations on his wonderful midterm marks.
x x x Sivvy
FEBRUARY 11, 1960
Dearest Mother and Warren,
A little middle-of-the-week letter to pass on some very pleasant news: picture (yesterday) your daughter/sister, resplendent in black wool suit, black cashmere coat, fawn kidskin gloves from Paris (Olwyn’s Christmas present) and matching calfskin bag (from Italy) … and of enormous and impressive size, sailing into the notorious York Minster pub on Dean Street in Soho, just off Shaftesbury Avenue, about 12:15 and up to the bar to meet a pleasant half-American, half-Scots young editor for the well-known British publishers, William Heinemann (publishers of Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, D. H. Lawrence, Erskine Caldwell, etc.), and taking out a pen thereupon and signing on the counter the contract for her first book of poems; namely, The Colossus.
Which is to say, the first British publisher I sent my new collection of poems to (almost one-third written at Yaddo; 48 poems in all, after countless weedings and reweedings) wrote back within the week accepting them! Amaze of amaze. I was so hardened to rejections that I waited till I actually signed the contract (with the usual 10 percent royalties, which, of course, will amount to nothing) before writing you. They do very few, very few poets at Heinemann and will do a nice book. It should come out late next fall or at New Year’s. It is dedicated to that paragon who has encouraged me through all my glooms about it, Ted. That means in our small family of soon-to-be three every member will have a book dedicated to him/her and written by some other member! Maybe the baby itself will inspire a children’s book, or several!
The Colossus and Other Poems, by Sylvia Plath. For Ted. That is what the book is, named after the title of the ninth poem in it, one written at Yaddo.
Ted waited in a pub next door for me to come in after seeing my editor (who now becomes my agent for America and will work on getting the book published there, if it doesn’t get the Yale prize this year), and we went to a pleasant, second-floor Soho Italian restaurant for veal and mushrooms to celebrate, having sat in the same restaurant in misery a month back, homeless and cold and very grim. Of course, I shall write Mrs. Prouty about it….
Much love to both of you …
Your new authoress,
Sivvy
FEBRUARY 18, 1960
Dear Mother and Warren,
… Just back from my doctor. I am in fine health and sleeping nine hours a night, plus a rest in the afternoon. Things are, thank goodness, quieting down a bit, although the builders are still in the house, doing the basement, second floor, and attic apartments. Only one other couple living here, on the ground floor, and the lady in the attic. How glad I am we are entrenched! …
Tonight we’re relaxing to the point of going to a movie, part of Ivan the Terrible, with Dido and Bill.
My book should come out sometime next autumn—I hope in October—and be fat, with 50 poems in it.*
We love hearing about the gallivantings of Sappho and her new rabbity escort. We saw little black kittens in a pet shop window and had to hurry past, because they only reminded us there was One Sappho and all others mere flashy copies….
Love, Sivvy
FEBRUARY 25, 1960
Dearest Mother,
I have been having a pleasant day in bed, resting and reading. Ted and I are alternating, one day each a week, until we are fully recovered from the strain of the last months and the settling in. He had his day Sunday. The one in bed orders what is desired for meals, reads, writes and sleeps. Now I am dressed and up and feeling much refreshed. Ted has made a beef stew, which is simmering ready for our supper; and we are going afterwards to the center of London to see Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, something I have been looking forward to for a long time: my first Ibsen play seen staged. I find I am made much happier by tragedy, good tragedy, classic tragedy, in movies and on stage than by so-called “hilarious musicals and/or farces.” We saw Brendan Behan’s musical, “The Hostage,” a while back and were both bored and depressed by w
hat the audience lapped up as funny, very tawdry and puerile wit, no plot, etc. Tragedy, on the other hand, really purifies and liberates me.
Last night Ted gave a reading of his poems at the Oxford Poetry Society. We left after lunch by train, a one hour and 15 minutes’ trip. I had never been to Oxford at all, so we went a few hours early and, though it was a cold, bleak, inhospitable day, walked about the black stone, antique lanes and into the little green courts of one or two colleges. The architecture is immensely impressive; much more of it than at Cambridge; the eating places, superb; and the atmosphere a really awesome, cloistered one. The only trouble … was the terribly noisy roar of traffic, out-of-town traffic, on the main crossroads—so dense I hestitated to cross the street. None of the country and open sky spilling into everything as there is in Cambridge, but very much of a big city. Yet, once in a little crooked college court, the sounds of the modern world vanish by magic. I think both Ted and I would like to have gone to Oxford, too.
We had a small tea while Ted ordered the list of his poems. His book, Lupercal, officially out March 18 [I wonder if the baby will coincide!), came the day before—his six copies—very conveniently. They’ve changed the blue of the cover to green, which put us off, and the red on the jacket and the purple on the cover are a bit of a clash to my morbidly sensitive eye, but looking at the book without the jacket, it is a handsome affair….
My obliging editor at Heinemann said to tell him my birthday and he will try to get my publication date as close to that as possible. The gallantry of the British! …
In two days N/R will be eight months, starting on the ninth. I am at last finding some leisure for reading, and Bill Merwin is supplying me with American history books. Hope to be writing soon again, too. I feel much freer (and appreciated, by publishers, at least) here to write than I ever did in America. I hope our mail-to-be-forwarded is lessening! We look forward now to living and writing in seclusion and skimming the cream off London periodically.